Providing a decade of interoperable assessment, IMS Question and Test Interoperability is a widely used specification for managing and sharing assessment material. Now that we are near the release of the final version of QTI v2.1 this paper provides an overview of the specification, outlining some of the key features of QTI v2.1 and its value for developers and educators. The intended audience for this paper is managers, learning technologists and developers interested in online and electronic assessment and new to QTI.

Summary: This paper reviews terminology, motivation, history and current work in areas relating to skill or competence. Many useful services, clarifying pathways within and from education to employment, self-assessment, and selection would be facilitated by better standardization of the format in which related definitions are represented, and also by a standard approach to representing the structured sets often called frameworks. To be effective, information models underlying interoperability specifications must be based on common conceptual models; the authors propose one such model as a work in progress. The authors see the way forward as reaching greater consensus about the components of competence, including intended learning outcomes, agreement on a model for frameworks allowing reuse of and comparison between components in and between frameworks, and investigation of how requirements and claims for skill and competence can be coordinated in the light of common practice in recruitment.

A CETIS Briefing paper on item banks, collections of assessment items and associated software to enable the storing of content to support the assessment of student learning. An assessment item is a complex object, consisting of a question together with its associated data such as score, feedback and either any media files required or links to those files. Item banking software enables items to be deposited, discovered and retrieved. In order to support the discovery and delivery of items, each item needs to be described with metadata, and may also be related to usage data.